The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel

by Michael Totten

  Most Lebanese Sunnis only supported liberal leaders like Siniora and Hariri as long as they were not in danger. They wanted the army for their protection rather than something that looked like al Qaeda, but that didn’t stop Fatah al-Islam fighters from infiltrating the country the previous year and blowing up Northern Lebanon. And a spokesman for whatever was left of the group issued a statement saying they’d stand by Lebanon’s Sunnis.

  Just a few months before the Nahr al-Bared conflict began, another radical Sunni group calling itself the Mujahideen in Lebanon made bloodcurdling Iraq-style threats of its own against Hezbollah.

  The “zero hour” was approaching, its communiqué said, for Lebanese Shias who would no longer be permitted to have their own “entity” inside the country. “Blood will flow like rivers,” they said. “Prepare your coffins and dig your graves. The hurricanes of the Mujahideen are coming to Lebanon.”

  Just moments after Nasrallah finished his speech, Royce Hutson saw Hezbollah fighters running up the street toward his house. They had already moved into position; the speech was their green light to go.

  He was a visiting professor at Beirut’s Lebanese American University and had already grown accustomed to working in countries torn asunder by conflict. That’s what brought him to Lebanon in the first place. He enjoyed teaching social work at Wayne State University in Michigan, but he felt a bit restless after a while and set out to edgier places where he could make more of a difference, first in Haiti and now in Lebanon.

  His apartment was bang on the front line in the Caracas neighborhood near Hariri’s Future TV station before the SSNP scorched it. He had a terrific view of the invasion out his picture windows before he pulled the curtains closed and ducked into his hallway as Charles had done.

  Several of his friends and colleagues lived three doors down in an apartment building housing teachers at the International College. He’d rather move in with them than spend days lying prone in his hallway, so he persuaded his doorman to let him out during a lull.

  No one was on the street. Every door and window was shut, and every car was punctured with bullet holes.

  The International College building was only three doors away, but it may as well have been miles.

  He ran. He ran with everything he had. He ran with everything he had and with his hands over his head, screaming “don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” until he made it inside and, gasping, slammed the door shut behind him.

  Not five minutes later, the street exploded again with another barrage of automatic weapons fire that didn’t let up even once for more than four hours.

  “I was so glad to be at the International College building,” he told me. “I wanted to be around foreigners. I knew Hezbollah wouldn’t target us. At least I didn’t think they would target us. I also didn’t want to be alone while going through that kind of thing.”

  There was no formal Sunni militia in West Beirut, but Hezbollah did meet some resistance from locals who had prepared for a day they knew was coming.

  “They were passing out AK-47s right outside my friend Susan’s building,” he said. “There was this old half-abandoned narghile market that never had any business. I always wondered what was up with it. Now I know. It was a weapons depot.”

  He was right that Hezbollah wasn’t interested in killing, kidnapping, or even harassing foreigners at that time. Hezbollah was at war with the Sunnis. He wasn’t naive or right by sheer chance. Unlike some Westerners who lived in Beirut’s luxurious bubble, he had been to the south, and not as a tourist.

  He spent a year directing a project down there and had lost track of how many times Hezbollah got in his face while he conducted his research. Every single one of the surveyors working for him had been detained at least once.

  Two Lebanese army soldiers once stopped his car while he was on his way to the Château Kefraya vineyard in the Bekaa Valley with a friend visiting from Detroit, and he was sure they were aligned with Hezbollah. One called Royce and his friend filthy Americans as the other stalked in circles around the car while repeatedly chambering and unchambering a round in his rifle.

  Anti-American as Hezbollah’s fighters undoubtedly were, they couldn’t be bothered with the likes of Royce and his British, American, and Canadian colleagues. The only people shooting at Hezbollah at the time were West Beirut’s Sunnis.

  Most teachers at the International College were terrified, even so. Two were hosting their mothers who had come to Beirut during the glorious spring months for vacation. The university president called and offered to put them on buses to Syria. Unlike Royce, most weren’t accustomed to living and working in anarchic regions or war zones. Lebanon wasn’t like Iraq or Gaza, where violence and misery were near constants. Much of the time, you could pretend it was a normal, if slightly ramshackle, country on the Mediterranean if you squinted at it and didn’t think about politics much.

  At least they had food. It was always wise to stock up with a week’s worth of food and water in Lebanon. After they pooled all their resources, Royce thought they might have enough to get through a month.

  He wasn’t the type of person who wanted to be put on a bus to Damascus like a refugee, so he called his regular car rental company.

  “If I want to take a car out of here,” he said, “will you give me one?”

  “We’re in the middle of a war here.”

  “Yeah,” Royce said and laughed. “I know. That’s why I might want a car.”

  “You know war damage isn’t covered by the insurance, right?”

  “I understand,” he said.

  The plan was to cram as many people into a car as humanly possible, drop it off at the Syrian border, and figure out how to return it after the guns cooled—however long that might take.

  When he checked his e-mail, he found a message from the U.S. Embassy listserv advising American citizens to get out of the country. Eight hundred dollars or so could pay for a water taxi to Cyprus from the Maronite port city of Jounieh. The Canadian Embassy had more practical advice. If the combatants start firing mortars, go below the fourth floor. If they stick to small-arms fire, stay above the fifth.

  Our mutual friend Charles called him. He also wasn’t interested in spending the next several days in his hallway or his bathtub, especially after he heard men in heavy boots on his stairs and his roof.

  “Charles!” Royce said. “I’m at the International College building and we’re having a potluck. Do you want to come over?”

  It was almost a stupid question. Royce risked his life running three doors down the street, and Charles lived a half mile away.

  But Charles made it.

  Aside from four hours of sleep, Charles had been on his phone and computer nonstop for more than twenty-four hours. If the electricity went out, he’d be more isolated and frightened than ever, and he’d have no idea what was happening anywhere but on his own street. His world would become deadly and small, but he didn’t know where he should go.

  He called Royce.

  “I’m at the International College building and we’re having a potluck,” Royce said. “Do you want to come over? We have the whole building here.”

  Charles knew that building well. Several of his friends lived over there, and it was just a few doors down from Royce’s place. The apartments were huge. They had plenty of room for him if he could figure out how to get through a half mile of checkpoints now that there was a lull.

  He rifled through his closet and found a T-shirt that looked vaguely like the SSNP flag in dim lighting. The SSNP logo is a spinning red storm or swastika, and his T-shirt showed a spinning tire, but it was close enough in the dark. So he donned it along with some black pants, stepped out onto the street, and pretended that’s where he belonged. He was the right age, had the right build, dressed the part, and feigned a look like he’d punch anyone who got in his way. The sun had gone down. If he stayed in the shadows, he just might pull it off.

  He grimly nodded at SSNP gunmen manning a checkpoint. They
nodded back. It was working. And it continued to work. Nobody messed with him. Hardly anyone even looked at him twice.

  Ten minutes later, he knocked on the door.

  “Wow.” Royce said as he opened up. “You actually made it.”

  Few of the resident teachers noticed he looked like an SSNP militiaman. Most probably didn’t even know what an SSNP militiaman looked like, and they weren’t about to hit the streets and find out.

  Most were frightened out of their minds, but Royce and a few others kept it together. This was Charles’s second Lebanon war. He was starting to get used to it. The war muscles in his mind were toughening up.

  Because he was half Lebanese and had been in Beirut longer than anyone else, they dubbed him the expert and pumped him for information.

  “Look,” he said. “Nobody knows which direction this is going to take. It could be over in a couple of days. The best thing you can do is just stay inside and keep your shutters closed.”

  They felt better having someone tell them they’d be okay, though Charles had no way of knowing they’d be okay. Outside was a war zone. Lebanon wasn’t okay.

  Everyone brought a different dish to the potluck and felt relieved to have been given a task. Preparing a meal and cohosting a dinner party less than thirty-six hours after the start of a war on your street is an accomplishment.

  Thomas Friedman captured the surreal quality of Lebanon’s civil war in his classic work of reportage From Beirut to Jerusalem. In the first chapter, he quotes a hostess at a dinner party in a house near the Green Line who notices her distinguished guests are getting impatient and hungry. “Would you like to eat now,” she asks casually while a ferocious battle rages outside the window,23 “or wait for the cease-fire?”

  Human beings can adapt to just about anything, but it takes time. Older generations of Lebanese fortified their emotions, their minds, and their nerves, but Charles and Royce attended a dinner party for foreigners, many of whom were more accustomed to tranquil North American suburbs than to Beirut even when the city was calm.

  They discussed their anxiety responses as they ate. No one could just sit down and read a book, not with gunshots ringing out on the street.

  Some responded by cleaning. They cleaned everything they could get their sponge on. If they had been putting off cleaning the oven, they cleaned the oven. Some wiped down the same counter-tops over and over again.

  Others, like Charles, let his apartment get dirtier while he consumed and shared as much information over the Internet and telephone as he could.

  He noticed that some responded brilliantly to the crisis and knew exactly how to take care of themselves even if their personal lives were a mess. Others who normally had it together buckled under the stress and had to be held by the hand.

  Most couldn’t sleep without alcohol. An extraordinary amount of alcohol was consumed in the building that night, but nobody acted like they were drunk. After finally crashing from booze intake and exhaustion, most didn’t stay down for long, and they went right back to their anxiety-relieving activities as soon as they woke up again.

  Charles told himself he felt calm, but he clenched his teeth so hard in his sleep that it hurt just to talk in the morning.

  He and Royce stepped outside the next day. Somebody had given the “all clear” sign. Neither had any idea who or how these things happened.

  Glass crunched under their boots. Nobody smiled. Children ran around collecting spent bullet casings. Most restaurants and shops remained closed while the owners knocked out the rest of the broken glass from their window frames and swept it up.

  Charles ran into a couple of friends who gave him a double-take. He hadn’t brought a change of clothes with him the night before and was still wearing the shirt and pants that made him look vaguely like a thug from the SSNP.

  The Lebanese army moved into the area, and some of the soldiers didn’t even try to hide their disgust when they saw him. If Charles really were a member of the SSNP, he’d have more authority on the street than they did. They couldn’t shoot anybody, nor could they arrest someone for shooting somebody. They couldn’t do much of anything but deter looters.

  “I need to get home,” Charles said to Royce. “I want to take a shower, and I have got to get out of these clothes.”

  So he went back to his apartment, thinking for the first time that the violent stage of the crisis might finally be over.

  It wasn’t.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  götterdämmerung

  We cannot go back to how we lived with them before. . . . Every boy here, his blood is boiling.

  —HUSSEIN AL-HAJ OBAID

  Hezbollah fighters stormed out of the dahiyeh, charged up the foothills of the Chouf Mountains, and battered the predominantly Druze region of Aley with mortar rounds and artillery fire. Amal and SSNP gunmen trapped Walid Jumblatt in his West Beirut house while his Progressive Socialist Party leaders in the mountains rounded up young men of fighting age and placed them into defensive positions.

  There hadn’t been a lot of actual fighting in West Beirut. For the most part, Hezbollah, Amal, and the SSNP went in with guns blazing and seized it. The Druze in the Chouf, though, fought as though Hezbollah threatened them with extinction.

  The overwhelming majority of Lebanon’s Druze backed Jumblatt and his Progressive Socialist Party, but a tiny minority sided with Talal Arslan’s so-called Lebanese Democratic Party, which was in league with Hezbollah and the Syrians. The Aley district was Arslan’s stronghold, such as it was, so Hezbollah made a peculiar decision in choosing that Druze city of cities to try to invade. If Nasrallah expected Arslan’s men to help out, he was mistaken.

  Jumblatt, one of the most adept Lebanese political leaders alive, knew just how to play this. He ordered all fighters loyal to him to surrender to Arslan and hand over their weapons. They did. Lebanese scholar Tony Badran1 pointed out this wasn’t a sign of weakness but “a shrewd move by a master tactician.”

  In times of genuine danger, sectarianism trumps every political position that has ever existed in Lebanon. Arslan had his tactical alliance with al-Assad and Hezbollah, but he wasn’t about to let an Iranian-backed Shia militia burn down his cities and murder his people. His men refused to accept Jumblatt’s surrender. They switched sides, and the two repelled Hezbollah’s invasion together. Residents were wounded and killed, houses were firebombed, women and children as well as men were left homeless, but Hezbollah failed to conquer even an inch of the Chouf.

  Badran noted a parallel development in the north.2 Omar Karami, who was briefly prime minister during the Syrian occupation, “lamented the ‘deep wound’ that has occurred between Sunnis and Shia, and told Hezbollah that if this becomes a sectarian fight, then we have two choices: to either stay home, or fight with our sect.”

  Political alliances have their limits, and Arslan’s people and Hezbollah discovered theirs. Hezbollah suddenly found itself with no friends at all in the mountains overlooking the dahiyeh. Together, Jumblatt and Arslan could have turned Hezbollah’s command and control center into a shooting gallery from their perch on the high ground.

  The Druze are among the fiercest of warriors, and everyone in Lebanon knows it. They are well known in Israel, too, where they often serve in elite units of the Israel Defense Forces and suffer lower-than-average casualty rates in battle. Most of Israel’s Sunni Arabs abstain from military service, but Druze Arabs are loyal to the Jewish state and will fight for it. There’s a reason two of the Middle East’s religious minorities—Maronite Christians and Druze—live in Lebanon’s mountains in significant numbers. Attempts to invade and subjugate them are ill-advised, very likely to fail, and therefore rarely attempted by even large armies. Geography preserves these micro-civilizations. Lebanon wouldn’t even exist as an independent republic if it were a plain instead of a mountain range.

  “People love to talk about how Jews and Israelis feel an existential threat,” Charles told me in the aftermath of all this, “but wh
at about the Druze? They are such a small community. There are only a few hundred thousand of them in Lebanon. All the Druze in the world were watching what was happening in those mountains.”

  “What happened in West Beirut was a given,” Lee Smith wrote.3 “According to a report from the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese paper Al-Akhbar , this coup had been planned well in advance, and its mastermind was the recently assassinated Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh. The government may in fact have forced Nasrallah to show his hand at a time of its choosing, not his. Hezbollah’s walkover in Beirut came as a surprise to no one; nor did the performance of the army, except perhaps the Bush administration which must now reconsider the amount of money it has spent on equipment and training for the Lebanese Armed Forces.”

  The Economist Intelligence Unit noted4 that “the military setback in the Chouf has served notice that Hezbollah has little chance of expanding its area of operations at the expense of other groups.” That was true, but it didn’t matter that much. Hezbollah didn’t need to expand. Nasrallah just needed impunity, and he got it when he proved to his internal enemies that he could rampage through the streets of Beirut whenever he wanted, and nobody—not even the national army—could stop him.

  “The U.S. has failed in Lebanon and they have to admit it,” Jumblatt said to Andrew Lee Butters at Time.5 “We have to wait and see the new rules which Hezbollah, Syria and Iran will set. They can do what they want.”

  Lebanese political analyst Abu Kais admired Hariri’s borderline pacifism and Jumblatt’s strategic and political acumen. They may have handled this as smartly as they could. Hezbollah sullied its name and reputation again while they preserved theirs. When it was over, however, he concluded—and he hardly had any choice—that despite the resistance in Tariq Jedideh and Aley, “the dark age of Hezbollah is upon us.”6